The ReadWrite Web; By M.Jalilian
The first part of Bemers-Lee's dream came to fruition in 1993, with the Development of the Mosaic Web browser. Seemingly overnight, the Internet went from a text- and nwnbers-based research tool for the few to a colorful, graphic world of information for the masses. Even though content was limited in those early days, millions of people soon started going online to read or "surf " the Web for information and entertainment. And as access spread, connections became faster, and more and more Web designers and authors set up shop, the twentieth century ended with the Internet taking its place as an essential communications and research network connecting people around the globe. But even with that initial period of immense and rapid growth, the original vision of being able to read and write to the Web was slow (in Internet terms, at least) to be realized. W riting to the Web required knowledge of the HTML codes that make Web pages work and of the protocols to get those pages up and running. To be sure, there were text-based newsgroups to share ideas and some sites like Amazon.com where readers could leave reviews and opinions. But for the most part, the ability to create content on the Web was nowhere near as easy as consuming it, and even those who could create did so with little means for easy collaboration. Today, however, this inability to create is no longer the case. The past few years have seen the development of an explosion of easy Internet publishing tools that have done much to fulfill Berners-Lee's concept of a Read/Write Web. As early as 2003, a Pew Internet & American Life Project found that more than 53 million American adults, or 44 percent of adult Internet users, had used the Internet to publish their thoughts, respond to others, post pictures, share files, and otherwise contribute to the explosion of content available online (Lenhart, Fallows, & Horrigan, 2004). And in 2007, another Pew study showed that 64 percent of all teens who use the Internet could be considered "content creators" (Lenhart, Madden, Macgill, & Smith, 2007). Today, in 2010, those numbers have no doubt increased significantly. In early 2009, Technorati.com, one of many blog-tracking services, listed over 133 million blogs (short for Weblogs). Blogs are the first widely adopted easy publishing tool of the Read/Write Web, which people use to create personal journals of their lives, build resource sites with colleagues, or filter the news of the day for audiences large and small with no need to know how to code pages or transfer files. And there is no doubt that blogs have become an influential medium in all walks of life, from politics to personal passions. Today, we are beginning to create and share our thoughts and lives online as a natural part of our daily lives. The ReadlWrite Web has arrived. And it's not just blogs. In the last few years, multimedia publishing by the masses has exploded. In early 2009, over 20 hours' worth of videos were being uploaded to YouTube.com each minute (that's right, I said minute), and YouTube.com is just one of dozens of popular video-publishing sites on the Web. Millions of photos, thousands of audio files, and countless other creations are now being added every day to the incredibly vast storehouse of information that the Web has become. As more people get more access to broadband connections and more powerful computers and even easier tools, this trend shows every sign of continuing to grow. We're in the midst of an explosion of technologies that will continue to remake the Web into the community-driven, participatory space Berners-Lee originally envisioned, changing our lives in many significant ways. These changes are already playing out in politics, journalism, and business. And from an educational standpoint, this new ReadlWrite Web promises to transform much of how we teach and learn as well. For most, however, even now, over a decade into the ReadlWrite Web, the significance of these changes is still just starting to be realized. We are no longer limited to being independent readers or consumers of information; as we'll see, we can also be collaborators in the creation of large storehouses of information. In the process, we can learn much about our world and ourselves. In almost every area of life, the Read/Write Web is changing our relationship to technology and rewriting the age-old paradigms of how things work. No doubt, these changes will take many more years to process. In fact, what author Dan Gillmor wrote a few years ago still holds true today: "The people who'll understand this best are probably just being born" (Gillmor, 2005). No question, the ReadlWrite Web holds transformational changes in store for teachers and students of all stripes. We will not be immune to these shifts. But, as is often the case, education has been slow to adapt to these new tools and potentials. In other areas of our lives, however, we can see some of these transformations happening right now, right in front of our eyes. Take politics, for example. No question that one of the main reasons for the success of the Obama campaign in 2008 was its understanding of the potentials inherent in the group-forming ability we now have. On his MyBarackObama.com site, supporters formed over 27,000 groups, everythingfrom "Bartenders for Barack" (21 members) to "Ravelry Knitters for Obama" (343 members), and within those groups they raised money, held rallies, and got out the vote. Both his MySpace and Facebook pages had over 1 million "friends" and President Obama's Twitter feed currently has over 1.7 million followers. (We'll go over Twitter in detail in Chapter 6.) There is no debate any longer that politicians who aren't taking advantage of the connective tissue of these technologies are putting themselves at risk of irrelevance. The ahility to easily publish text, pictures, and video is also changing the face of journalism and media as we know it. There is no better example than the coverage of last year's uprising in Iran after the contested elections in June. Despite the hest attempts of the government to crack down on traditional reporters in terms of getting news out of the country, tens of thousands of Iranian citizen journalists armed with cell phone and computers captured the attention of the world with their nonstop photos, videos, blog posts, and Tweets. While long-standing media outlets like the New York Times and National Public Radio did their best to filter, edit, and synthesize all of the information coming out of the protests, those of us interested in learning more could access the raw accounts on YouTube.com or on Flickr.com (a photo-sharing site), much of it being distributed through channels that didn't even exist a year or two ago. And, as with the heartbreaking Indian Ocean earthquake and resulting tsunami in 2004, and the horrible devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005, one of the best places to get the latest information about what was occurring in Iran was at Wikipedia. In the first week of protests, the article on the "2009 Iranian Election Protests" was updated almost 2,000 times by hundreds of contributors who left over 145 citations at the bottom of the page. In essence, it became a clearinghouse of information based on the work of amateur researchers who published facts and photos and links as they found them. We're seeing a new model of journalism evolving right in front of us, one that is much more immediate and much more complex in terms of who to trust and what to believe. And that new model has been repeated over and over as big news stories hit on national or local levels. In reality, the ReadlWrite Web has created millions of amateur reporters who now have their own digital printing presses. It's also created millions of amateur editors who are, in blogging parlance, ready to "fact-check your a*'" whenever a major story breaks. And today, even the newspapers themselves are inviting tbeir readers to participate, understanding what former reporter turned blogger Dan Gillmor knew early on: "If my readers know more than I do (which I know they do), I can include them in the process of making my journalism better" (as cited in Koman, 2005). In 2007, USA TODA Y was among the first to make it possible for readers to comment on any story-adding opinions, asking further questions, or even correcting what was written-and most other online newspapers have since followed suit. In essence, every article is a blog post. By including people in the process, this new Web creates all sorts of opportunities for participatory journalism, which, of course, creates all sorts of new definitions and descriptions of just what journalism is. Traditional media outlets such as The Washington Post, the BBC, and others, are scrambling to respond to this trend, creating interactive spaces for readers, buying on-the-spot news photos from people with camera phones, and running amateur video of news events. These are huge, transformative shifts to a model that has lasted for hundreds of years, and these changes show no signs of slowing. For all these reasons and more, I think this is a hugely challenging time to be an educator. The world is changing around us, yet as a system, we have been very, very slow to react. Our students' realities in terms of the way they communicate and learn are very different from our own. By and large, they are "out there" using a wide variety of technologies that they are told they can't use when they corne to school. They are building vast social networks with little or no guidance from adults. They are using much more complex and flexible digital information with hardly any instruction on how it differs from the paper world. In the four years since the first printing of this book, tens of thousands of teachers and students have begun using some of these tools, but the vast majority of educators still have little or no context for these shifts. And, more importantly, very few people, educators or otherwise, have yet to experience the transformative potential of these new tools in terms of their own personal learning. Without question, our ability to easily publish content online and to connect to vast networks of passionate learners will force us to rethink the way we communicate with our constituents, the way we deliver our curriculum, and the expectations we have of our students. The Web also has the potential to radically change what we assume about teaching and learning, and it presents us with important questions to consider: What needs to change about our curriculum when our students have the ability to reach audiences far beyond our classroom walls? What changes must we make in our teaching as it becomes easier to bring primary sources to our students? How do we need to rethink our ideas of literacy when we must prepare our students to become not only readers and writers, but editors and collaborators and publishers as well? And, I think most importantly, how can we as learners begin to take advantage of the opportunities these tools present, so we may understand more clearly the pedagogies used in the classroom? At its heart, the implications of this new Web are all about learning first, teaching second. On first blush, these new technologies may not seem well suited to a climate of standardized test scores and government accountability. Some see the constructionist, collaborative pedagogy of Weblogs, wikis, digital photo and video, and others as presenting a risk instead of a solution for a system whose students continue to struggle to stay apace of their international peers. In reality, however, these tools have considerable relevance to state and local core content curriculum standards, and there is much reason to believe their implementation in schools will better prepare students for a slew of new literacies and competencies in their post-education lives. Results of a Netday survey released in March 2005 assert that technology has become "an indispensable tool in the education of today's students." The survey showed that 81 percent of students in Grades 7-12 have e-mail accounts, 75 percent have at least one Instant Messenger (1M) screen name, and that 97 percent believe strongly that technology use is important in education. And, the fastest-growing age group for using the Intemet is 2 to 5 year olds (NetDay News, 2005). According to author and technologist Marc Prensky, "this online life is a whole lot bigger than just the Internet. This online life has become an entire strategy for how to live, survive, and thrive in the twenty-first century where cyberspace is a part of everyday life" (Prensky, 2004). This immersion in technology has neurological effects as well. William D. Winn, director of the Learning Center at the University of Washington, believes that years of computer use results in children who "think differently from us. They develop hypertext minds. They leap around. It's as though their cognitive structures were parallel, not sequential" (Prensky, 2001a). In other words, today's students may not be well suited to the more linear progression of learning that most educational systems employ. Most teachers in today's schools, meanwhile, were not surrounded by technology growing up. And the speed with which these technologies have been developed (remember, the Web browser is only 15 years old) means that it's a daunting task for many to catch up to their students. The bad news is that the ReadIWrite Web threatens to make these differences between teachers and learners even more acute. Whereas students are open to the ways of new technologies, schools by and large are not. Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs, says "The kind of questioning, collaborative, active, lateral rather than hierarchical pedagogy that participatory media both forces and enables is not the kind of change that takes place quickly or at all in public schools" (Rheingold, 2007, p. 2). All of this paints the picture of an educational system that is out of touch with the way its students learn. The good news, however, is that the tools discussed in this book have just as much chance of closing this gap as widening it. The reason is because by their very nature, they are relatively easy for anyone to employ in the classroom. The sudden explosion in online content creation could not occur if technological barriers to entry were high, and these barriers will continue to come down as the tools themselves continue to evolve. Even more important is that most of the tools of the ReadIWrite Web are free and will most likely stay that way as open-source software alternatives continue to grow. That doesn't mean that it won't be work for many teachers to get up to speed with these new tools and teaching methods. But on the whole, we can be optimistic that once the potential of the ReadIWrite Web finds its way into schools, students and teachers will be launched on a path of discovery and learning like they have never experienced before. As you read this book, I have one request: Before you attempt to bring these technologies to your students, first be selfish about their use in your own learning practice. While there is no doubt my classes were in many ways profoundly changed by blogs ,wikis, and the like, the bigger truth is that the transformation in my own personal learning practice is what informed my work with students. It wasn't until I fully understood how these technologies could facilitate global connections and conversations around my own passions, and how they could help me create powerful learning networks and communities, that I was able to see what needed to change in tenus of my curriculum and my teaching. Learning in this environment is about being able to construct, develop, sustain, and participate in global networks that render time and place less and less relevant. In fact, in a world where our students will hold between 12 and 14 jobs by the time they reach 38 years old, it's imperative we develop in them a kind of network literacy to guide them in this process. That doesn't mean that every teacher needs to start a blog or create a wiki or a podcast. But it does mean that, as educators, we must tap into the potentials that these tools give us for learning. And that doesn't just mean learning about our craft or technology or our curriculum. It means learning about whatever we are passionate about. For me, that's figuring out how these shifts and how these tools change the nature of learning and what that implies for education. But it also means learning more about the Chicago Cubs, photography, and many other topics that hold my interest. For you, it can mean a whole array of different things. The common thread, I believe, is that we make these connections in our own practice first so we can thoroughly understand the pedagogical implications for the classroom. Since the first edition of this book went to press in 2006, tens of thousands of teachers and students have begun to implement these technologies. But the reality is that the vast majority of educators have taken the work they had students do in the paper, analog world and simply digitized it. And I think that's because they haven't experienced the Connections that come after the work is published and shared. Giving students a chance to share their work with a global audience is an important first step, but there is much more to it. It's the conversations, the links, and the networks that grow from them afterward that really show us the profound implications for lifelong learning. So, as you read and consider these tools, I would urge you to ask yourselves the following questions: • What are your passions? • Who are your teachers? Are they all in physical space? • How are you building your own learning networks using these tools? • In this new environment, how are you modeling your learning for your students?